My friends at Indigo Keys came out with their debut album, Journey to Arcturus awhile back and I finally got around to listening to it a few months ago.

Journey To Arcturus is their first track and after listening to it just once, I immediately put pen to paper and free associated visions, feelings, rhythms. I recorded my writing and voice over the track and what you hear is the final product - first draft, no edits. I strongly encourage this to be enjoyed in the following manner: lie on your back, grab some high quality (preferably noise cancellation) headphones, close your eyes and take a deep deep breath. See you on the other side.

Our lives and humanity are untidy: disorganized and careworn. Life on earth is often a raunchy and violent experience. It can be agony just to get through the day. And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, ‘This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.

— Anne Lamott

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me, “Wow, it must be so depressing to do what you do.” What I often think but do not say is, “Not at all. It’s beautiful to share in someone else’s suffering and to feel less alone knowing I’m part of a species of overthinking human beings on an endless journey searching for happiness.” What I usually end up saying is something painfully diplomatic, “Yes it’s hard work but very fulfilling.”

I don’t find depressing things depressing. What is truly depressing to me is when the discrepancy between how someone is told to feel and how they actually feel is gaping and unbridgeable. In other words, when we feel pain surfacing, the most depressing thing is to be told to “swallow it” or better yet "cheer up."

We often wrap uncomfortable emotions and situations in a “pretty bow” rather than acknowledging how terrible and deeply troubling they are. The emotions running on the joy continuum are greeted with open arms. They are no-brainer emotions we openly flaunt. We are told to freely express them through words, body, dance, art, food, drinks and love making. We are made to believe that an overabundance of happiness is what makes the world go round and we hurry to drown out the pain signals that so clearly need attention.

Pain signals to us when undesirable things happen — when our selves, our loved ones, our community, our world, sustains some degree of distress. Pain signals when life feels entirely too messy. Signals are loud and clear when unprocessed pain and unresolved issues from childhood resurface. Many of us frequently aren’t quite sure how we’re going to make it through the unchallenging job, the too-good-to-leave-too-bad-to-stay relationships, the annoying housemates, our family member’s illness, the big scary questions we ask ourselves about our place in and contribution to the world, etc. These moments of being out of balance is usually when the waves of emotion rise: fear, terror, grief, hopelessness, futility, jealousy, disconnectedness, uncertainty, numbness, sadness, anger, disappointment, loneliness.

And these are the ones we’re told implicitly or explicitly to swallow, to get under control, to put a lid on, to have a better grasp on, to hide, diminish, dismiss, ignore, devalue. Often by well-meaning people around us who may not be comfortable sitting with their own pain and vulnerabilities. These are the times when we don’t (won’t?) allow ourselves and each other to feel the full extent of what we need to feel (from the well-meaning pat on the back “don’t cry, be strong,” to handing over tissues with an encouragement to “smile”). Ladies and gentleman, that is the saddest, most depressing phenomenon in my opinion. Not to mention how annoying it is to be told “be positive” when we feel like crap.

There’s invaluable data inside pain and all the other uncomfortable emotions we call “negative.” I learn a lot about myself, namely, what I expect from the world and what I think the world expects from me. My younger-self emerges and asks for things my critical adult-self would never ask for. In witnessing these “negative” emotions in my friends and family, I also get a glimpse into what it is they fundamentally need and secretly crave. I get to learn what their pain signals look like when their needs aren’t met. I can grow closer to myself and also show up for those I love.

But the most important message is this: our capacity for pain mirrors our capacity for love. When we allow ourselves to dive deep into our feelings of love, we will invariably feel the range of emotions associated with pain. Both cause our hearts to ache and both are profoundly necessary to being in a whole human experience.

I am disappointed with therapists, media, life coaches, and self-help books promoting only positivity or even remotely suggesting that positivity is "better" than "negativity." I can’t tell you how damaging it can be to our sense of Self and normalcy. It can often result in critical self-judgments such as:

“I should be over this by now” “Everyone else seems so happy, what’s wrong with me?” “I have to keep it together at work and even at home with my partner” “I never cry in front of people” “Showing negative emotions is weak and a sign that you’re not in control”“On paper I have a great life, why can’t I just be happier?”

We must honor our pain. We need to hold it to the light and examine what it’s trying to tell us. We would never ignore a physical wound on our bodies, why would we avoid the emotional ones? Pain is a signal but more importantly it is a necessary part of the human condition. Feel it, listen to it, honor it. If you find the courage, allow witnesses to your pain. When you’ve done that, you can then decide whether or not you’ve learned enough from it for now. Maybe you need to lean into the pain a bit longer to derive meaning or perhaps you’d like to set it aside for the time being and when it resurfaces, attend to it once more.

But please, for the sake of humanity, let’s all just stop being so goddamn positive. Honor the beautiful, honor the ugly. Human experience is neither positive nor negative, it simply is and all of it is glorious.

We are truly a culture of consumers. The rise in disposable income among Americans directly correlates to more access to disposable products. Because space is a coveted commodity, we carve out more space to accommodate our hoarding lifestyle, and when these auxiliary spaces are tightly packed, things begin to overflow into storage space and our parent’s garage. There’s a reason why theWall Street Journal calls the self-storage industry “recession resistant.” As a result, Americans end up spending $10 billion a year on self-help and personal organizational products according to Marketdata Enterprises, and I only recently learned The National Association of Professional Organizers is actually a thing and has steadily grown into a $1 billion industry. While a professional organizer might have trouble explaining their job title 20 years ago, a present day professional organizer is a fairly self-explanatory concept. We can all nod our heads and agree that in some God-forsaken corner of our house we could really use the help of a professional to aid in the decluttering of our increasingly unmanageable lives.

That same National Association of Professional Organizers (which I still have such a hard time believing exists) also conducted a survey and that found 54 percent of Americans feel overwhelmed by their physical clutter and 78 percent find it too cumbersome to even deal with. Can you imagine the mental clutter that must exist in a culture where we buy, buy, buy to feel good about ourselves? We aren’t just hoarding physical clutter folks! We collect mental clutter from the past (ruminating over the would’ve, could’ve and should’ve, regrets over things that were/weren’t done), we pre-order clutter for the future (worrying about things that hasn’t happened, planning for things that simply cannot be planned for). If physical clutter can actually elevate stress hormones imagine what mental clutter can do to a person.

As annoying as it might be to step around a pile of Amazon/Nasty Gal/Crate and Barrel boxes waiting to be flattened, I’m guessing that’s nothing compared to the frustration of your mind cluttered with thoughts that say you’re not good enough for your partner and they are going to eventually find someone better and leave you. Talk about killjoy.

In many ways, professional organizer is also an accurate description of my job. I help organize and re-arrange mental, emotional and psychological clutter. When people’s mental real estate begin to feel like a land mine and when they begin to feel psychically crowded, they come to me — among other therapeutic strategies independent of therapy of course — to organize. The organization tends to result in room to breathe and eventually clarity to make sound decisions.

Here’s the thing, mental clutter is really hard to avoid and I certainly am not immune to it even though I make a living dusting off other people’s mental cobwebs. Being the food enthusiast that I am, I naturally turn to food when I feel overwhelmed and crowded by my own thoughts or feelings. Counter seats facing the open kitchen is hands down my (and David Chang’s) favorite spot at a restaurant. Sometimes you don’t have much of a choice because waiting for a table takes too long or counter seats are all they have (I’m talkin to you Yamo) but even when given an option, I can’t imagine a better way to experience my dinner. It’s perfect for when I’m dining alone or with a book, I always love chatting up the staff (and score desserts and taste-test new menu items), there’s never a dull moment watching the chefs or bar tenders work their magic, and on nippier SF nights, those also tend to be the warmest seats in the house.

Anyone who’s sat at the counter knows exactly what I mean when I say there is an ordered chaos in a restaurant kitchen, a fluidity that can only be achieved through what professionals in the industry refer to as mise-en place, or literally, “put in place,” a French phrase that means to gather and arrange the tools and ingredients needed before you begin to cook. For many chefs, the connotations of the phrase runs much deeper than a checklist of items or ingredients to gather. It is a mind set, a religion even. I would argue that the ordered chaos in the kitchen is very often the same chaos we experience mentally and internally when we are flooded with thoughts and emotions.

Our minds are our stations and how ready our stations are (carefully arranged cracked pepper, softened butter, sea salt, knives, bowls, etc.) is the state of our nervous system. When our stations are stocked, prioritized and ready to go, we can navigate the day even when we get hit below the belt.

The preparation process required of a psychological mise-en place deploys our defenses and helps create a sense of direction and order in the midst of the chaos of our daily lives.At the root of mise-en place is the belief that time, resources and space are precious commodities. The very things that, when scarce, crowd our garages and minds. In any given moment we probably have 8-10 different distractions or competing priorities pulling us in directions beyond our reach, be it our own defeatist thoughts about underperforming at work, an Instagram comment that needs a response, a medication we forgot to take, or motivation to put in work at the gym. Then there’s FOMO, the perils of dating apps, out-of-towners visiting, cracked iPhone screens, $74 parking tickets, and the a—hole that peed on your stoop. These things can quickly accumulate much like dishes in a sink and before you know it, you’re too exhausted to clean up. A psychological Mise-en place provides a ritual where there often feels like none.

Ron Friedman, business consultant for Harvard Business Review, suggests applying mise-en place to our daily routines and starting the first 10 minutes of our day tending to “the meez.”

“What’s the first thing you do when you arrive at your desk? For many of us, checking email or listening to voice mail is practically automatic. In many ways, these are among the worst ways to start a day. Both activities hijack our focus and put us in a reactive mode, where other people’s priorities take center stage. They are the equivalent of entering a kitchen and looking for a spill to clean or a pot to scrub. A better approach is to begin your day with a brief planning session. An intellectual mise-en-place ... Ask yourself this question the moment you sit at your desk: The day is over and I am leaving the office with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have I achieved?”

Tomorrow morning, take 10 minutes at the start of your day to set your intentions and prioritize the truly important things you would like to spend energy on that day while recognizing what’s fluff. Visualize what you hope to achieve at the end of the day and imagine what this might feel like, close your eyes if you have to.

What helps me is to come up with a one liner, a mantra to carry with me throughout the day. This type of deliberate reflection has also been shown to increase your daily performance by 22.8%, which makes sense because reflection and intention setting is intended to recalibrate the mind and body. Over time, as this becomes a consistent and more natural practice, new neuro pathways will form and our resilience to stressors will build, mitigating the effects of new clutter. With all that extra space in our heads, we can finally begin to contemplate the truly important things in life such as, why are people attracted to Russell Brand and why do men have nipples?

I’m struggling at the moment. More specifically, I’m struggling with myself. You see, I’ve had certain ideas about myself since I was a little girl. I created ideas to make sense of my experiences and of these ideas revolved around how lovable I was. On the one hand I had life affirming experiences in which beliefs of being worthy, important and cherished crystallized into gems that studded my childlike consciousness. I’ve also had confusing, disorienting memories by which the ideas of being less than, undeserving, and unloved began to form in twisted, knotted roots that threatened to strangle the very existence of the crystal garden in which I played.

The idea that unpleasant experiences make a deeper impact than pleasant ones is not a new discovery. Fortunately and unfortunately, human beings are hard-wired to over-learn from unpleasant experiences and under-learn from pleasant ones and I am inclined to agree (mostly). From an evolutionary standpoint you would be more likely to survive if you assumed the worst about the rustling in the bushes and braced yourself for a sabertooth tiger. At worst, your limbic cortex has already been prepared for fight or flight and at best it’s a squirrel, in which case no harm done. You may likely not pass down your gene pool by always assuming the best about what’s lingering in the bushes. In other words, fear of pain is hard-wired into us and locking in painful memories make it less likely to make the same “mistakes,” at least according to our lizard brains.

When it comes to more evolved humans, however, it becomes trickier. When our purpose in life is not simply survival but to experience vibrancy and to strive towards self-actualization, the relationship between pain and pleasure shifts. We are no longer concerned our brains will fail to protect us from touching the hot stove. Our concerns revolve around ways we create and stay in our pain-narratives, i.e. the feedback loop of believing something and giving more weight to experiences that confirm that belief. We created stories to make sense of our pain at an age when we felt helpless and yet we continue clinging to them even as we become more empowered adults. Camus says:

“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.

We are now asking the questions, “Why do we continue holding onto our painful beliefs and repeating our destructive cycles long after we have already concluded they are self-destructive? What keeps us in these patterns, beliefs and realities even when they no longer serve us?”

Even Freud scratched his head at this seemingly contradictory phenomenon that we attach ourselves to pain in the interest of avoiding it. Furthermore, this seems to violate every element of his pleasure principle, which claims humans fear pain and seek pleasure. If our hard-wiring protects us from pain, why do we experience so damn much of it still? And more importantly, why do many of us seek pain and fear pleasure?

Schopenhauer attempts to explain our propensity for suffering by saying our desire for happiness is the real perpetrator. He believed happiness occurs only when we satisfy a desire, at which point the happiness ceases because it has already been fulfilled. Happiness, therefore, “can never be more than deliverance from a pain.”

A friend once told me he had created his pain-narrative at a young age to make sense of his tumultuous family dynamic. Over the last decade, pain had been a dependable companion and he could always expect its arrival, making these periodic visits a ritualistic constant in his life. Joy, on the other hand, did not come as consistently and so he couldn’t be loyal to it. I could relate since I too was fiercely loyal to my own pain but I refused to believe our truths were determined by our paleomammalian brains operating automatically for the sole purpose of survival. What would happen if I consciously attended to the full spectrum of my experiences rather than allowing my lizard brain to drive all my memories? Could I being to re-write my narrative and change my destiny?

In a Huffington Post entry, I share my belief that pain is a necessary part of our whole human experience. Our capacity for pain mirrors our capacity for love. One does not exist without the other. I had friends and family write to me saying they enjoyed the post because it validated their experience of pain. I also had others send more somber messages asking what they should do if sadness and pain was all they could feel? For them, the problem wasn’t that they weren’t permitted to take a dip in the pool of pain but rather, they were drowning in the deepest corners of the ocean of despair. Happiness was not only elusive, it belonged to another reality entirely.

Perhaps this reflects how conflicted humanity has been and continues to be when it comes to understanding why we remain loyal to our pain while claiming in the same breath we hunger for happiness; why do I enjoy playing in my crystal garden while watering the roots that threaten to destroy it?

I’m realizing I should have began this piece with the disclaimer that I wouldn’t be short changing my audience with a reductionistic (albeit less lengthy) “listicle” like “8 steps to achieving happiness” mostly because I am not interested in condoning quick fixes for emotional relief. The purpose of this piece is less about finding a life hack and more to do with acknowledging our moments of disconnection and suffering because in our collective consciousness, our pain is one and the same. Healing can come not only by witnessing someone else’s pain but also through the act of joining them there.

So let me join you and share my own struggles with this frustrating dialectic. I recognize the value and limitation of being loyal to my pain on a daily basis. I am aware of the ways it has captured my attention and created my realities. My automatic thought to someone not waving back to me is, “What did I do wrong?” and the belief, “I’m not important enough” surfaces when loved ones fail to return a text. It has protected me from rejection and by the same token has also caused tremendous suffering.

At the end of the day and regardless of which combination of theories I subscribe to, I am aware that in my house, fear - to quote the Sufi poet Hafiz - is truly the “cheapest room” in my house and pain is where I run to when I don’t know where else to go. I am nowhere near consistent in my conscious choosing and have to frequently remind myself of William James’ words, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” It takes tremendous effort to work through messages from my well-meaning lizard brain, to honor the hard-wired survival mechanism driven by fear, and to become aware when I am reacting automatically and confirming old narratives. I honor my pain and recognize the walls that were erected because of it. I know that just because the walls are there does not mean I have to live within its confines.

I am grateful to know I have such powerful built in mechanisms to protect me. It is also truly an undertaking and a triumph to know I can steer off the path of my neurobiological make-up to pave new grooves that will guide me in the constant revision of my narrative.

Viktor Frankl describes the space between stimulus and response as our power to choose our response and “in our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Through making conscious choices and re-inventing our realities, we are better able to extract meaning from all our experiences, whether it’s meaning in pain or love, old patterns or new ones. Perhaps if we can remind ourselves to be awake with awareness, choose with intention, attend consciously, and derive meaning from places we thought was impossible, that can be enough for the time being.

It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

— Marcel Proust

With all our talk of being liberated individuals and Carl’s Jr commercials of women giving oral sex to cheeseburgers, we still have tremendous amounts of shame attached to our sexual lives. Our society speaks openly about certain aspects of sex but often does not think about sex in the right ways. Rather than using sex as a tool for healing, we often use sex as a distraction, an avoidance to confront important things. We might be feeling anxious about an upcoming deadline or ineffectual about meeting our partner’s needs. Perhaps we have not yet discovered the totality of all we have to offer.

It could be that we simply don't know what we desire in sex; how we wish to feel. More commonly, there are so many layers of shame attached to our sexual desires and fantasies.

When you really examine the concept of sex, you might realize that nothing that is sexy isn’t also quite revolting. That’s the whole point isn’t it? When done with the right person, sex symbolically transforms the dirty to clean.

We can embrace our sexual role-playing games, sexual pseudo-violence, forbidden fantasies; these might be “dirty” by conventional standards and convention may be sensible but it’s also downright boring. Sexual eroticism is more readily bred through unpredictability, danger, boundless imagination, and an access to realities that might otherwise be forbidden or revolting. We call these our darkest sexual fantasies because that is exactly where they live, in the dark and dusty corners of our minds, alongside shame.

And therein lies an important dialectical opposition. the shameful nature of our fantasies fuels our sexual arousal while diminishing our socially-constructed sense of integrity. If we can socially construct our idea of normalcy, it can also be deconstructed to fit what works for us. So go ahead, ask yourself, do you have a shameful fantasy you want to share with yourself?